Hope on Holy Saturday
Reflections on Pope Benedict XVI's Spe Salvi
As regular readers know, I haven’t written much over the last several days because I was preparing for (and then recovering from) the annual Frederik and Emma Schemmel Theology Lecture at Clarke University this past Tuesday, on the theme of “The Future of the Synodal Church in the U.S.” The lecture was a success, and thanks to everyone who wished me well. I’ve been told a video recording of the lecture should be available soon on YouTube, so I will share a link as soon as I can.
But to get back in the swing of things, I thought I would write some reflections on Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi, on Christian hope. I know this may seem like a strange choice. After all, I usually provide commentary on newly released Vatican documents, yet Spe Salvi is nearly twenty years old. And there is so much going on in the world and in the Church right now that I would have enough to write about for the next few weeks even without digging into the past.
Even so, I still think it’s worthwhile to take a fresh look at Spe Salvi. For one, reflecting on hope remains terribly relevant in our troubled world. Millions of the world’s poor are at risk of losing access to life-saving HIV medication as a result of the freezing of the PEPFAR program. In the United States, immigrants are being detained or deported, in some cases to a harsh “mega-prison” in El Salvador, without due process. Government agencies with critical functions like the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Disease Control are in danger of institutional breakdown as a result of haphazard budget cuts and staff layoffs. A trade war instigated by the Trump administration has created the risk of a global recession that may lead to both rising unemployment and rising inflation. There are indeed real temptations to despair, the opposite of hope.
Second, and more personally, over the past year I’ve realized how I’ve struggled with maintaining the virtue of hope at various points in my life. This has led me to try to deepen my own understanding and practice of hope. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine this relatively recent magisterial statement on the virtue. And third, I have to confess, I had never read Spe Salvi. I don’t remember exactly what I had going on in late 2007, but I didn’t read the encyclical when it came out and then never came back to it. So, there you go.
And I thought that Holy Saturday would be a good opportunity to reflect on hope. Shattered and scattered after Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, Jesus’ disciples could only place their hope in his promise that he would rise from the dead after three days. Holy Saturday represents a moment of hope between the suffering of Good Friday and the fulfillment of Easter.
Spe Salvi was intended as part of a trilogy of encyclicals on the three theological virtues. Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2005), focuses on the virtue of love or charity. At the end of his pontificate, he had begun an encyclical on faith, but after Benedict’s resignation, Pope Francis finished the document, publishing Lumen Fidei in 2013. Spe Salvi reflects some of the concerns that had preoccupied Joseph Ratzinger before his election as pope: the inadequacies of secular narratives of progress, whether in terms of scientific and technological progress or Marxism’s promise of a classless utopia; and theological questions related to eschatology. The encyclical also reflects Ratzinger’s German intellectual milieu. For example, he cites the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, who likewise eschewed modern narratives of endless progress, and the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who developed an influential secular account of hope, although not mentioned in the encyclical, certainly lurks in the background. The encyclical is also reminiscent of the “theology of hope” associated with Ratzinger’s contemporaries, the Protestant Jürgen Moltmann and the Catholic Johann Baptist Metz.
But Spe Salvi also reflects the context of the 2000s. For example, some have read it as in part a response to the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who gained prominence in those years. Also, some, including Ratzinger himself, had attributed the spread of practices like physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in the early 21st century to a lack of hope, and so the encyclical is Benedict’s account of the “reason for your hope” (1 Pet. 3:15).
But enough background; let’s get to the document. My aim is not to give a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the encyclical or to offer a critical analysis of its themes, but to highlight a few of the main themes in the encyclical and their continuing relevance today.
One of Pope Benedict’s aims in Spe Salvi is to explain the link between faith and hope. Indeed, as Benedict himself notes, the terms often seem interchangeable (#2). For example, in Hebrews 11:1, a passage Benedict extensively analyzes, faith is described as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (RSVCE). And this tight connection between faith and hope is necessary. If faith is our trusting belief in what has been revealed to us in Christ, then hope is our trust in Christ’s promise of eternal life. As Benedict puts it, “a distinguishing mark of Christians” is “the fact that they have a future,” that is, the knowledge that “their life will not end in emptiness” (#2).
Benedict explains that the Christian message is not merely “informative,” it is also, and more importantly, “performative.” He elaborates, “the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing” (#2). The contemporary Protestant theologian Daniel Migliore makes a similar point, that Christian revelation is “personal” in the sense that it demands a response from us. It is not simply information that adds to our store of knowledge. There’s a kind of knowledge that implicates us in action. Imagine the absurdity if a person, upon being told their house was on fire or that an employer was offering them their dream job, merely responded, “Well, that’s interesting”! These revelations demand a response. The Gospel is something like that, a fact we actually see in the Gospels themselves—the people who encounter Jesus either leave everything to follow him or turn away from (or even against) him, but none remain indifferent.
If we respond to this encounter with faith and become disciples of Christ, then our hope in Christ’s promises “makes things happen and is life-changing.” Hope in our redemption is not merely a belief about the future; one might say it is a kind of power that enables us to act in new ways because of the assurance that we “have a future.” As Benedict writes later in the encyclical, “All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action” (#35). Without hope, daily frustrations and failures, but also catastrophes of world-shaping magnitude like war, economic decline, or political turmoil, can leads us to either disillusionment and despair or fanaticism. In a crucial line, Benedict writes:
Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere. (#35)
One might add that hope helps us to see possibilities and recognize opportunities to which we might have been blind without this trust in “the indestructible power of Love.”
Benedict goes on to say that hope is linked to an acceptance of suffering. Accepting suffering doesn’t mean that we have no responsibility for alleviating the suffering of others; on the contrary, preventing and alleviating suffering are “among the fundamental requirements of the Christian life and every truly human life” (#36). That being said, it is not within our power to eliminate suffering because human sinfulness is “a constant source of suffering” (#36). We are tempted to flee from suffering, even in pursuit of what is truly good, leading to a life of meaninglessness and emptiness. Christian hope, however, allows us to accept suffering, knowing it is transformed through Christ’s suffering and resurrection: “Christ descended into ‘Hell’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light” (#37). He adds that it is by accepting suffering that we are also truly able to serve those who suffer. If I cannot accept suffering, I cannot take on the suffering of another in the form of compassion. And we have to be willing to undergo suffering through renunciation and self-denial to truly help those who are suffering (#38).
The theological virtue of hope is sometimes hard to explain because we use the word “hope” in many different ways (we have the same problem with “love”). We typically use the word “hope” to describe our desire for a goal we set out to achieve (“I hope I can find a good, well-paying job.”) or even a wish for something nice (“I hope I get to go to Paris some day!”). Some Christians try to draw a hard line between this kind of hope and the theological virtue of hope: “The theological virtue of hope only refers to our hope in the promise of salvation and eternal life!”
This latter approach is certainly right to define hope in relation to the promise of eternal life, but it risks making hope seem completely otherworldly and disconnected from our more mundane aspirations. Does hope refer only to the trust we place in God regarding our fate after death, with no relation to our aspirations and frustrations in this life? We’ve already seen that, in Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict insists that Christian hope is “performative” because it changes how we live in the here and now. But he also teaches that our more mundane hopes don’t need to be seen as in opposition to our hope in eternal life; instead, our hope in Christ puts those mundane hopes in a new light.
Benedict explains that our day-to-day activities are shaped by what he calls “our lesser and greater hopes”: our “lesser hopes” might be things like finding a new job, graduating college, or getting over an illness, while “greater hopes” might be more lasting and socially-oriented goals like successfully raising a family, making a contribution to one’s field, or helping to make the world a better place through service or political involvement. Although Benedict isn’t explicit about it, these “greater hopes” tend to be related to the things for which we collectively endeavor as a society. In our pursuit of these hopes, however, we are inevitably faced by frustration and even failure. As I already noted, these disappointments can lead us to disillusionment. Placing our hope in our redemption and in the promise of eternal life, however, helps us to endure these disappointments: “I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for” (#35).
That being said, Benedict’s point is not that these worldly hopes are futile or a distraction from the hope we place in our salvation. Elsewhere in the encyclical, Benedict admits that it is good when we achieve these worldly hopes. In fact, making, pursuing, and accomplishing these goals can “keep us going day by day” (#31). These “lesser hopes” can even be one positive way of responding to suffering, for example, by achieving small steps on the path of recovery from a serious injury or illness. Nevertheless, we ultimately find these worldly hopes unsatisfying: “When these hopes are fulfilled, . . . it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole” (#30). He adds: “This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain” (#31).
At the dawn of the modern age, Benedict recounts, humankind gained a newfound mastery over nature through the Scientific Revolution. Modern science and the technological discoveries stemming from it seemed to promise an age of continuous progress, a hope still prevalent today. Likewise, scientific and technological progress seemed to promise humankind’s complete dominion over nature and the means of overcoming suffering. As Benedict points out, by promising to overcome the effects of original sin, science and technology took on a salvific role, displacing faith in Jesus Christ. The Christian faith was not eliminated, but rather considered irrelevant for worldly affairs and relegated to the private sphere of otherworldly belief (#17).
By the end of the eighteenth century, faith in the human capacity to remake the world had extended from nature to human society itself. The French Revolution marked a turning point in which the old order of society was overthrown in the name of human reason and freedom (#19). In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx laid out a scientific approach to the revolutionary transformation of society by the proletariat (#20). In both cases, the traditional notion of the Kingdom of God was repudiated and repurposed for secular aims.
Here Benedict turns to themes that run throughout his theological work. Despite the accomplishments of modern science and technology and political achievements like democracy, human rights, and the modern welfare state, modern progress has also unleashed on the world the horrors of genocide, the atomic bomb, and potential environmental catastrophe. He adds: “If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world” (#22). Real progress depends on hope in God. Reason without God turns inward on itself, and freedom without God lacks its foundation and goal (#23).
Benedict then makes what I think is one of the most insightful points in the encyclical. Although progress is possible in terms of technological development and material abundance, similar progress is not possible for human morality because “man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew” (#24). Freedom allows humankind to invent all kinds of new evils, but also to return to evils thought buried in the past. The slogan “We are not going back” can be an aspiration, but never a certainty.
Although it is not mentioned by name in the encyclical, Benedict’s argument here is linked to his ongoing polemic with liberation theology. In Benedict’s view, liberation theology, although born out of the immense suffering of the poor, had adopted Marxism’s insistence that there is a discernible and certain progress in history, linking (although not equating) this progress with salvation history. Benedict, however, emphasizes that the fragility of freedom means that failure is always a possibility, not just in our personal lives, but in history, as well. He points to the example of St. Augustine who carried out his ministry amidst the political and social crises of the Roman Empire and the impending destruction of Roman Africa (#29).
Again, Benedict’s point is that hope is what empowers us to keep going even in the midst of failure, whether personal failure or social crisis, as in the case of Augustine. But likewise, this does not mean that hope is purely otherworldly. For example, he points out that Augustine continued “to transmit hope, the hope which came to him from faith and which, in complete contrast with his introverted temperament, enabled him to take part decisively and with all his strength in the task of building up the city” (#29). Hope is what allows us to “build up” even in the midst of suffering and failure. Thus, “every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom,” even if each new generation also has the freedom to turn away from the good and toward evil (#25).
Early in the encyclical he makes a similar point, contrasting the Roman slave Spartacus’s rebellion with the Apostle Paul’s seeming toleration of slavery in his letter to Philemon. While Spartacus’s social revolution only led to further bloodshed, Christianity offered Roman slaves “an encounter with the living God and thus an encounter with a hope stronger than the sufferings of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed life and the world from within.” Paul’s insistence to Philemon that he see the slave Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” did not have the power to change social structures, but nevertheless gradually led to lasting change in society (#4).
There is much more to consider in Spe Salvi. For example, Benedict considers what we actually mean when we speak of “eternal life”: Is it, perhaps, life as we know it, but simply without end, or something we cannot really comprehend? And the encyclical ends with a reflection on eschatology, in which Benedict remains open to the possibility that the most obstinate and cruel sinners may be punished with eternal damnation, but he likewise argues that perhaps the majority of humankind will experience the purification of Purgatory, a final experience of hope in the midst of suffering before entering the Kingdom of God.
As we witness the destruction of institutions that have contributed a great deal to the common good, like the United States’ foreign aid infrastructure, and the recrudescence of an ugly nativism, Pope Benedict XVI’s Spe Salvi helps to inspire hope in the midst of loss. It provides encouragement to keep “building up the city.” But it’s also a profound meditation on how hope in our personal lives does not mean otherworldly neglect of our goals and aspirations, but rather “makes things happen.”